The Embedded Intellectuals
How the ruling class create a cultural hegemony
We are currently living in an age of anger where vengeful nationalism is the norm. Nations across the globe have turned to the right — in some cases the far right — and they have been ennobled by intellectuals who have given succour to the harshest of belief systems.
Misogyny and racism is rife on social media as the left behind and disaffected in the modern world have lashed out and turned their anger on invented enemies. They strive for a fictitious bygone golden age where Britannia ruled the waves and the sun never set on the British Empire.
In the US, there are even Conservative intellectuals who support Trump: a man ignorant of public policy and contemptuous of democratic norms. They are attracted to him due to his unadulterated eagerness to call out the establishment.
In the UK, Brexit supporting intellectuals played a key part in the Vote Leave project by overturning the cultural dominance of EU favouring establishment intellectuals. From Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, intellectuals play a critical part in explaining and legitimising a hegemony.
I discussed with Uncle how public intellectuals through the ages have set the agenda for our times and whether history could teach us some lessons.
Baba Raihan,
The British East India Company (EIC), decidedly cunning as they were, employed the services of some of the most powerful intellectuals of the time. Two notable names unmistakably come to my mind, John Stuart Mill and Thomas Babington Macaulay.
It is possibly known to some that J S Mill spent his entire working life in the service of the EIC. But few if any are aware as to his actual position within the Company and how he helped shape the Company’s policy of expansion and annexation; loot and plunder. He was a champion of the EIC and following the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 and the British Government’s decision to impose direct rule, Mill wrote a paper in defence of the Company. It was so brilliant that Lord Grey described it as the ablest state paper he had ever read.
Mill was dubbed the ‘most influential English speaking philosopher of the 19th century.’ He joined the EIC at the age of 17 and spent the next 35 years with the Company. I hope you have not forgotten the fact that the Company required a bond for employees before they set sail for India — a euphemism for a bribe!
Mill’s father, James Mill wrote ‘The History of India’ in 1817 which divided Indian history into three parts: Hindu, Muslim and British.
J S Mill helped formulate the EIC policies which were designed to prolong its occupation and maximise its profits from its overseas adventures. The values of liberalism, humanism and universalism he propounded in his philosophical essay On Liberty were in stark contrast to those of his employers whose tyrannical rule he helped perpetuate and flourish through his steadfast defence.
Embedded journalism entered the lexicon of the English language when journalists went into Iraq along with the US troops to topple Saddam Hussein. These journalists have signed contracts with the military promising not to reveal compromising information. They would only transmit information approved by the military and paint the picture of an essential liberating force.
So was the role of the EIC intellectuals, you may call them Embedded Intellectuals as shorn of their conscience, their main role was to brainwash the British public who would enjoy the vicarious pleasure and bask in the reflected glory of the Company. This policy of the apologists could be called the ‘doctrine of eclipse.’ They thought their writings and public pronouncements would successfully eclipse their private malfeasance for good, not knowing that no eclipse be it solar or lunar, is permanent. The eclipse ends, the light comes out and the dirt that you thought to have disappeared into darkness, reappears into the full glow of sunlight, this time multiplying the stink.
As for their claim of educating the masses, the Company thwarted and stymied every attempt to educate the common people of India. These embedded intellectuals espoused the idea of universal education, liberalism and humanism keeping more than 90% of the population illiterate and uneducated. These were clearly acts of hypocrisy, pretensions and betrayal on the part of the so called intellectuals.
With apologies to Abraham Lincoln, the East India Company was a Company of the bribe, by the bribe and for the bribe!
3 July 2020
